"I want the public to see my email, " she wrote in the Tweet. "I asked State to release them. They said they will review them for release as soon as possible."

Obviously the best way to ensure that a public official's emails are seen by the public is to hide them on a privately managed server.

Anyway, it's nice, I suppose, that Clinton asked State to review and release her emails, but it's also totally beside the point. The problem is that the Department of State didn't have all of her emails to begin with.

Instead, according to The New York Times, trusted Clinton aides recently reviewed her emails and turned over some 55,000 pages of them to the Department of State. So, at very best, Clinton is asking State to turn over emails that her staffers have already weeded through and marked as potentially acceptable for public consumption.

What we need to see are the other emails—the full batch of written electronic communications she sent and received in her professional capacity as Secretary of State, unedited by her politically minded staff.

It is incredibly hard to justify Clinton's decision to keep those emails out of public view and uncollected by federal recordkeeping. As a former director of litigation at the National Archives and Records Administration toldThe New York Times when the story first broke, "It is very difficult to conceive of a scenario — short of nuclear winter — where an agency would be justified in allowing its cabinet-level head officer to solely use a private email communications channel for the conduct of government business." Yet that is exactly what Clinton did. (You may note there was no nuclear winter in the last six years.)

That Clinton took unusual and perhaps out-of-bounds steps to hide her emails only makes it more important that they now be accessible to the public. In context, her tweet suggests that, contrary to her stated desire to see her emails made accessible to the public, she prefers to hide many of her electronic communicatations from public scruntiny.

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I think that this scandal has legs because it is pretty simple to understand.

I don’t know how many people have an email address for their job, but I bet it is a lot. And all of them know how much trouble they’d be in if they up and decided to use their gmail account instead.

Who working in the corporate world doesn’t have both a work email address and a non-work address? You send all the fun stuff via the non-work address and use the work address for strictly business stuff.

I don’t know about “simple to understand”. I’ve been battling with a some total jackanapes at a different site who seem to think this is no big deal/BOOOSH! When I brought up that any classified data spill from that account basically amounts to knowingly committing a felony, the SNOWDEN!!!!!!!! stuff started in earnest, along with the many, many, many talking points that were put out over the last day and a half (most of which have been defeated by further reporting, interestingly).

I don’t think that it’s been proven that the physical server was located in the house. It’s possible, but the reports only seem to focus on a whois search that gave the domain registry information. It’s possible that the domain was purchased, but the actual server was maintained by a 3rd party. Certainly not one of the big web-mail providers.

There are several domain services that will sell you e-mail domain names just like that for a small fee or even register it for free. It’s relatively easy to do.

See, this is what I mean. In your second paragraph you seem to say everyone can appreciate how much trouble they’d get into but in your third you say everyone does it anyway. I think this is going to have a hard time resonating with the public as something awful.

You don’t think lots of people use their private accounts for business stuff, especially preliminary discussions before finalizations, and then formalize the agreements with their official accounts? I’m betting that’s common place.

Bo, with all due respect, it’s pretty clear from your statements that you’ve never been out of college. No, you don’t use your private e-mail for business discussions, especially for anything that is transactional. The first thing any manager is going to wonder is what the hell you’re saying that you don’t want the company to know about it.

I’ve had a business email address for 20+ years at various companies. I’ve never heard of anyone using their private email address for company business, especially when the company provides you with one.

Other than trying to keep emails from potential subpoenas, there is no other reason to set up a private email server, most especially when you work in a sensitive position, like Secretary of State, and have to full resources of the federal government to keep your government supplied email address and emails safe.

Bo, serious question, have you ever actually worked for a living at any company? It is not common place, the exact opposite is true. You are constantly trained and pushed to NEVER use personal email for business transactions in office administration jobs for security and consistency purposes. In more higher sec positions (like when I previously worked at an APC factory and in corrections) it’s a fire-able offense. Yet apparently the Secretary of State shouldn’t be held to the basic standard of a lowly private company employee.

Yet apparently the Secretary of State shouldn’t be held to the basic standard of a lowly private company employee.

Well we know the President of the United States isn’t held to the lowly private employee standard either, specifically if his name is Clinton. I mean hell, I don’t know of any private sector employee who wouldn’t immediately be fired for getting his knob slobbed under his office desk by a subordinate, and then lying to a Grand Jury in a matter related to his job.

I’m just trying to figure out the angle on this Hillary deal though. Either, it’s coming up now so the MSM can throw it out there and when someone tries to bring it all up during actual primary season, they can all say “oh that’s old news, everyone’s moved on” (ala Bill)…or… if they’re trying to fry her because they really don’t want any more Clintons and they’re trying to set the stage for Fauxcahontas because she said she wouldn’t run if Hillary is running.

No, everyone does not do that. No one does it. If you work for an organization, you get an email account that is on their servers and you DO NOT use your personal email account for work related activities.

But working for a government agency, especially the fucking state department, and trying to hide your emails on a private server and exposing them to potential hackers?

Are you out of your fucking mind, Bo? You clearly are completely clueless about what you are talking about, that much is clear as day.

Bo, it’s completely unprofessional, and a breach of ethics. You’re exposing internal company business to potential security breaches which they have no control over. They control the company servers. If there is a break of security, they know about and can fix it. They can’t fix a breach of security if someone hacks your private email account. They could lose millions of dollars via disclosures of proprietary data, or god forbid, something classified.

It doesn’t fucking matter if people want to use private e-mail for work. I’m sure plenty of people do. For reasons not much different from Ms. Clinton – they want to have correspondence not show up on the official records. Companies don’t allow it precisely because it doesn’t leave an audit trail.

There may be people out there who are using their personal accounts to send NSFW images to their work buddies. But that would be IT. They are certainly not conducting ANY sort of work-related business via private email, and if they are, they are definitely violating company policy.

Bo, many businesses that handle sensitive information don’t allow you to even open a non-business email account on company equipment.

That’s how seriously this is taken.

Don’t bloviate about things other people have far more experience with.

Nobody, but nobody, in a hospital would be allowed to do what Hillary did. As soon as IT found about it, it would escalate to Compliance and then to Legal, and the message (likely from me personally) would be “You have a choice: never, ever use your home email for work. Or you can quit your job. Choose now. And we’ll be auditing all you work email traffic, and if I see one message that includes your home email anywhere in the string, you’re fired. Got it?”:

That raises a good point RC. Surely SOMEBODY noticed that she wasn’t using a state.gov address during the course of all of her correspondence. And yet, nobody called her on it? How is everyone is feigning some type of surprise? Why didn’t somebody at the White House call her up and say, “yo HIll, what’s with this clintonmail address? You need to be conducting your business on your state.gov address.”

I really hope you are trolling, Bo, because at least then I’ll know you’re sane. If you honestly think you’ve made a good rebuttal to Jimbo, please seek help.

Clinton did not have a govt address and then her personal address for the “fun emails.” She ONLY had a private email.

We – people who actually work in businesses and have experience with this stuff – know that the private email and “fun emails” are frowned upon. Even if the boss is cool with it and engages in it, it’s understood that it’s not really Right. A govt manager, and presidential hopeful, is supposed to be better than us. She’s not supposed to play these games.

And again, no official govt email. So the comparison doesn’t even work, nor will it come to mind for most people. The comparison will be doing ALL of one’s business on your personal address, which most of us would rightly consider crazy.

Bo….I sometimes check into the NYT on a story like this just to see how the Dem-bots are thinking. Typically, the NYT Picks are 100% pro Obama/Clinton etc., and 75% of the Reader Picks are too. On this story about 50% of the NYT picks were very anti-Clinton. The 50% that were not anti-Clinton were not defending her, but it was Mitt Romney’s worse. The Reader picks were 90% anti-Clinton. A lot of self described supporters, people who were pulling for her over Obama 8 years ago said they could not vote for her because of this.

“I think that this scandal has legs because it is pretty simple to understand.”

I don’t think it has legs.

I just think it reminds everybody that Hillary Clinton’s integrity died the death of a thousand cuts 20 years ago–and nothing has changed.

She’s taking money from foreign governments–again.

I’m looking at her donor list. There’s a lot to like if you’re a Republican challenger. She’s taking money from the Sultanate of Oman and “The Friends of Saudi Arabia”, whoever the hell that is, as well as the the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The State of Qatar, the State of Kuwait.

If you’re a Democrat challenger, there’s a lot to like, too. She’s taken money from Wal*Mart, Bank of America, et. al.

We’ve seen this all before. Some of her “donors” in Little Rock ended up in jail. She’s learned nothing. This is her and Al taking money from the CCP again–except she wasn’t the First Lady this time. She was the Secretary of State.

Everybody over 40 has seen this movie before. Last thing you want to do before announcing your candidacy is make your donors look suspicious for donating. Where’s the FEC on this?

The FEC commissioners better cancel their summer vacations. They’re gonna have a lot of work to do. This is gonna be hillarious.

Whenever Team Clinton was asked whether something they did was ethical, they would always respond with the answer that it was legal.

“Ms. Clinton, do you think it’s ethical to raise money from foreign governments while you’re holding the office of Secretary of State?”

Her answer will always be that it was legal.

But that isn’t the question!

The Clintons got away with this shit before because it wasn’t enough to impeach them with once they got into the White House, but this isn’t about impeaching a sitting President. It’s about whether you want to vote for a sleazy Secretary of State that accepts donations from foreign governments.

Sadly, maybe not much. As most here know, I am on the left on many issues- it would be my preference that the left takes her to task for this, but that may not happen. It was good to see that the NYT did break the story, so maybe there is hope.

Fun fact: the left seems to be fairly split on this whole thing three ways. 1. Hillary’s done and they are very disappointed (most in this camp already resented Hillary in the first place), 2. BOOOOOSH! (most in this camp aggressively fail to understand anything remotely useful about how information systems work and how protection of classified/sensitive information is treated in the government/contracting community), 3. SNOWDEN IS GUILTY OF TREASON!!!!!!!!!! (people who can’t distinguish whistleblowers casting light on illegal/immoral government activities and bureaucrats actively trying to obfuscate and deceive).

I’m no fan of Clinton’s but I’m having a hard time seeing how this is such an awful offense. I would have thought that any government employee would keep a separate private email given they have to know their official one is potentially public knowledge.

It’s also interesting that the massive coverage this is getting in the ‘MSM’ seems to complicate the standard conservative line about them being shills for her and the Democrat Party.

Bo, she is welcome to have a private account for communicating whatever she wants on her private time about non-SoS stuff. Football pool picks, dress pics (white and gold), etc. No one at all would begrudge her that.

Where she gets wrapped around the axle is when she uses a private account for stuff related to her job as SoS. I know she probably has trouble with the term, but she is a public servant and we are her boss. As an employee she is obliged to make her job related communications available to we the people.

If you were a private employer would you allow the CFO to conduct business using their private account? Never. What would you do in a dispute with others? You would have no way of proving what your employee said or promised if they weren’t using official email addresses.

I’ll have to take your word for it about the seriousness of the legal consequences. My only experience with it is indirect, I had a prof that preferred his personal email for our correspondence since he didn’t like the functionality or format of our college one and I had a woman I dated who worked for a state agency that would use her personal email, especially when using her phone when out of the office, to arrange meetings with co-workers. I just don’t see this resonating with them.

Also, companies can get pulled into legal action and have all THEIR assets subpoenaed if an employee does something legally questionable on a private account while discussing business – classified or not.

Bo, your retard, do you have the slightest understanding of what “proprietary data” means? How about “disclosure” and “non-disclosure”? Do you understand that you can blow a fucking patent by accidentally disclosing data on an invention before the application is filed? Do you understand what the consequences of unintentionally leaked proprietary data can be for a company?

Although, for senior people, there’s a secure phone app that will allow you to check your work email from a smart phone. But for me the only way to access my work email from home is to VPN in and remote desktop to my work computer.

No, everyone does not do what she did. If it where a Gmail or Yahoo account I might be slightly inclined to agree with you. But, she went through great trouble and expense to set this up. She had to purchase servers, network gear, and software. Not to mention hiring people to set it all up and run it over a period of 6 years. I would guess that it cost her somewhere in neighborhood of $50,000 a year. So, you should ask yourself why would someone go to those great lengths when you can sign up for a Gmail account in under 5 minutes. The only conclusion that makes any sense is that she did not want anyone to have any type of access to her email. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft all maintain very good logs, backups, and audit trails. And, they comply with subpenas in a very timely fashion. And, Clinton didn’t want any that.

Bo, have you been following anything that is less than 48 hours old on this? She EXCLUSIVELY used this account for all business, official or not. It was set up SPECIFICALLY for this, and on the day of her confirmation hearings beginning. Oh, and it was a separately-purchased domain, so not one of the typical web-mail deals, meaning it was either managed out of the Chappaquiddick residence by some unknown IT admin, or managed for them by some heretofore unknown IaaS/SaaS provider.

Reports that came out after the initial one (multiple, independent reports) said precisely that.

Also, in case you missed it, last night either in a main story or in a comments section, it was reported that White House/DoS IT people were aware, reportedly tried to convince her people that it was a terrible, insecure idea, and were rebuffed.

Guys, don’t feed his condition by acting as if there was anything to discuss with him. Instead, encourage him to get help. Engaging him as if he was not suffering from a treatable disorder does him no favors.

“When you work for an organization, your emails are not your private property. Those emails belong to the organization. ”

I’m not missing that premise, in fact my argument is itself based on it. “I would have thought that any government employee would keep a separate private email given they have to know their official one is potentially public knowledge.”

Hillary DELIBERATELY and actively refused to even obtain a DoS official e-mail (and according to one of the links posted here, refused even the non-public/secret account that bureaucrats COMMONLY use to keep from getting spammed by random people).

The simple fact that it was the only email account she used is really enough to show that is was an attempt to keep her correspondence hidden. And there clearly were rules in place to discourage that.

I will say this though- hardly anyone can in business or politics could function effectively if every piece of communication were to be made public. People should be able to say things off the record. Its how you move discussions along without concern about “politically correct” things to say.

That is not an excuse for her…the rules were clear. If it is our expectation that all business that is conducted on email in privy to public scrutiny, then if you need to say something off the record maybe you need to say it and not write it.

Mind you, I’m not saying she didn’t break a rule, I’m sure she did. I’m sure that organizations, especially government ones, have such rules and I see the logic behind them. My entire point is that, for the reasons you give, lots of people are going to bend and break these rules. Those rules are like the speeding limits that everyone breaks. And for that reason I don’t see the charge resonating much.

Good point, Bo. You know, there is somewhat of a libertarian principle here at work. What right does the government have to ALL correspondence?

My take would be if you work for them, you play by their rules. But you do want those employees to conduct business and get to problem resolution without their hands tied as to what they can and cannot say for public scrutiny. I guess its much harder today to feel freedom. All of those politicians in the past…Johnson, Kennedy, Reagan…all of them…I bet they would be saying to themselves “I don’t know how you folks today can get anything done.”

I can’t imagine Begin, Sadat and Carter working under those constraints.

would have thought that any government employee would keep a separate private email given they have to know their official one is potentially public knowledge.

Yes, I would expect Clinton to have a separate private email for her dirty laundry. I would NOT expect her to use that email exclusively for all her business , including official, classified work for the State Department.

I am not concerned with seeing her emails. What concerns me is the opening she created for security breach. It seems almost certain to me that someone hacked the account to monitor the goings on of the secretary of state. Her judgement is dangerously flawed, breathtakingly so.

No matter what the emails reveal it won’t be as bad as the fact that she probably laid bare to our enemies what the state department was up to. It would be insane to let her into the oval office.

What will be the official talking points for why it is out of bounds to discuss the possibility that she could potentially be blackmailed as the POTUS by someone who had gained access to those emails and found something very damaging?

It technically doesn’t even matter if anyone successfully hacked it (though I believe that’s the main reason we know about this – some Romanian guy, I heard?). What matters is that the personal account had classified data spilled on it. That means ANYTHING that touched it also is contaminated.

I’m almost disappointed that she probably just lost the nomination. I would be so much fun to see her stumbling through a general election. I bet there is far far more to come. She and Bill have been living separate lives for years – think he has tamed his appetite?

She of course went into the patented Clinton “tu quoque” mode: “Colin Powell did the same thing!” Unfortunately, that was before the email rules were put into place, but that won’t spoil the narrative. Can we just yell, “Racist!” whenever her minions roll that one out?

Powell did not deliberately set up his own private account, managed by – potentially – her own IT staff, and then proceed to do ALL DoS business on that account.

At the time Powell was in there, DoS was getting used to the whole 21st century thing. I did lots of international travel during the time of Powell (latter part) and Clinton. The DoS always sent out briefings for the countries one was visiting if one registered beforehand. The e-mails did not really begin to be useful until 2007 or so.

Powell (and Rice) likely conducted their classified business in the many traditional ways. The fact that Hillary allowed the release of 55,000 e-mails from this account suggests the amount of business done via e-mail went WAY up. The likelihood of some of that being classified business is pretty high.

I already explained the Powell situation and more importantly how THIS situation differs both in degree and kind from that one.

Hillary DELIBERATELY set out to deceive. Powell was working with a system in transition, during a time when everyday business was most likely still being conducted primarily by STU phone, secure discussions, labeled and cover-sheeted documents, and work on air-gapped/secure (non-Internet accessible) information systems.

To be clear, I’m not missing your point that Bush and Powell operated under different security rules, I understand Clinton violated some security rule, I’m talking about the inherent wrongness of this type of thing. I’m just saying that the fact that Bush and Powell did it undercuts the charge that this is some inherent, obvious wrong that ‘no one would allow or do.’

Powell used private e-mail that was almost certainly one or more of the known services, backups of which are easily obtainable.

Hillary did something completely different, and deliberately evasive. Deliberate evasion is essentially a big “I’m guilty of releasing state secrets” banner for any normal person holding even a low clearance that covers mundane stuff that shouldn’t even be classified.

Do you not get she was Secretary of State? She was communicating secretly with foreign governments! This is way, way, way past someone working for GM in management using a gmail account. And, that would get you fired most likely.

All her emails have to be pulled, from the NSA, from her server. Her aides must be subpoenaed (provided they don’t ‘commit suicide’ first). Clinton likely committed treason. If she didn’t, she covered her tracks as if she were doing that.

“I’ve never worked for any company that this would not be a get your ass fired offense.”

I guess you didn’t work for the government when Powell did or for Jeb Bush then, because it seems like they did some of this (albeit it seems they may have done it on a much smaller scale and/or under a different time and legal environment).

Fake scandal. Look over here…Scott Walker said something mean to a girl in his 2nd grade class and eight year old Rand Paul once burned ants with a magnifying glass while his dad laughed and joked about fleet-footed black track stars.

Look, it’s really simple: official business is done on official email accounts for security reasons. If I conducted company business on my personal account and confidential information got leaked – I would be packing my things and walking out the door right now.

I work in financial services, where any email to a customer must go through the work email system for supervision and backup. An isolated lapse might get a slap on the wrist, but doing it deliberately is a no-question firing offense. Fail to fire for that, the supervisor is risking his/her license in the next regulatory audit. That’s for a private company with no national security implications.

FINRA requires like 3-4 layers of regulatory controls over communication, either to customers or in ‘regular course of business’.

1 is that they always need to be recoverable and ‘available’ in case of any subsequent questions; 2 is that they always include disclosures and not include any materials that could be considered ‘marketing’ (*that hasn’t been pre-approved by your Supervising Analyst/Agent/regulatory officer), and 3 is that they need to have approved encryption if they include client-sensitive/account info…etc.

then there’s the company-specific communications protocols.

IOW… exactly what you’re saying = anyone in the professional world already adheres to standards far less rigid than that of senior Federal Government officials – and would be canned outright for anything less than strict adherence to standard.

However, politicians follow the “why does a dog lick its balls” line of reasoning = they do what they do *because they can*.

Under the Obama admin, Hillary seems to have believed that flouting law was AOK because …. well, maybe she’s just untouchable.

again – i find it hard for anyone to play this “but everybody does it!” card when only a month or so ago the Federal Government was threatening David Petraeus with jail time over the same exact shit.

She was the Sec of State and she hid emails from her own government. This is the first time I’ve thought ‘hey, maybe there is a use for the NSA after all’.

They have copies. Thanks to Ed we all know that. They have to be pulled. Every one of them. Personal, or otherwise. Even the ones about carpet munching with Huma, and her being upset Bill was doing 14 year olds. All of them.

If her IT cronies are the least bit competent/loyal, they either did a ‘shred’ on the things that needed that treatment, or they off-sited things even deeper in some backup system only they know about.

If the disc is unavailable and smashed or burnt, then there is no explanation other than treason. Love notes between her and Huma might even help her politically. She could survive that. It would only be criminal or treasonous acts that would cause her to destroy evidence at this point.

“”I want the public to see my email, ” she wrote in the Tweet. “I asked State to release them.”

THESE ARENT THE DROIDS YOU’RE LOOKING FOR

Is she really doing the “answer a question that wasn’t asked” thing now?

i.e. “We want to see the emails you purposely kept on your private server at home” “OF COURSE YOU CAN SEE MY WORK EMAIL THAT STATE DEPT ALREADY HAS” “no, we’re asking for the stuff you hid which state does not have” “YES THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT I SAID” “no, we want access to your separate email server” “ITS BECAUSE I’M A WOMAN ISNT IT“

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